fritz haeg

DOMESTIC INTEGRITIES

16 february 2012 - 27 april 2013

Take every geometry of the cosmos and the mind and treat it as a primordial garden, a virginal state, a wild domus on the edges of where time and history dissolve. Illuminated by a salvific and regenerating idea of the universal home, Domestic Integrities explores the remote depths of the human constitution and the innermost facets of the synergistic relationships that inform the sphere of living beings

Observe, collect, transform, compose, respect. Fritz Haeg seeks the principles for an organic rituality of the everyday, where everyone can discover how we belong to overarching rules and structures, bringing new meaning to the reality of our being in nature, and together with nature. Domestic Integrities started as a laboratory to filter and assimilate the rural environment, one of contact and mutual exchange between ancient, long-rooted actions, or those freshly conceived by the local community. It evolves following a centripetal geographic spiral, a movement gathering formulas of relationship and integration from the surroundings, to be later on enacted in the core of the domestic space. This is the arena where to learn and test, at once a sounding board and a collective archive of the fields

This original, dense landscape in constant metamorphosis, is also a platform of experimentation about agricultural biodiversity as a point of juncture between human work and the preservation of nature. On these foundations, the project develops through many editions, mostly in urban settings, sited at the MoMA in New York, the Hayward Gallery in London, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and other places

Domestic Integrities is rooted in the pattern integrity theory that Richard Buckminster Fuller developed to explain the separation between an animate entity and its materiality. Energy and knowledge are split from the cyclical nature of biological processes. They are left to show the way towards the whole of "further discoverabilities inherent in eternally regenerative Universe" and the principles that underpin it, the way towards the wellspring of reality

With Domestic Integrities, Fritz Haeg concentrates his attention on human beings and their living spaces. The work completes a trilogy that started in 2005 with Edible Estates, a series of vegetable gardens made to replace the private courtyards of families around the world, and continued with Animal Estates, a project that used architectural shelters and other hospitality strategies to explore the possibility of reintroducing indigenous wildlife into a place that has long been metropolitan. Haeg trained as an architect and has developed his explorations across disciplines and media, including ecology, performance, dance, horticulture and design. He has worked in many settings and within museums, including the Tate Modern, Whitney Museum of American Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT